Wojciech Leder: 10+1

Leder sought a formula for his own art that would allow him to create successive paintings according to principles similar to those by which nature operates. If one could speak of Leder imitating nature at all, it would only be in the sense that the painter attempts to imitate nature’s creative powers—to create in symbiosis with the material he uses rather than violate it or force it to express something that, by its very nature, it cannot express. This raw-material or material aspect of painting, in the sense Leder persistently seeks to give it, becomes all the more important and programmatic because it rests on a vision—newly articulated in contemporary art—of the mutual relationship between nature and culture: the two worlds in which human life begins and ends, and is fulfilled (or remains unfulfilled).